Can a trio of rich guys — Dean Spanos, Stan Kroenke and Donald Trump — inspire Californians to bypass politicians and solve their housing crisis at the ballot box?

Probably not. Then again, the idea is no crazier than this election season.

Or, for that matter, the state’s housing policy of the last few decades, in which local governments restrict the supply of homes and push costs higher while their leaders complain about declining affordability. And then they boost prices and rents further by taxing each new private project to subsidize a tiny number of “affordable” apartments, built with gold-plated amenities.

Motivating renters politically, however slim the prospect, is key to disrupting this cycle. Certainly, renters may never love the idea of more neighbors, and the resulting competition for resources, any more than owners have.

But with wages stagnant and rents rising briskly, it doesn’t take much economic literacy to realize that their troubles begin with a shortage of housing. After all, tough zoning enriches existing property owners, and more of them vote in local elections. Renters may wake up.

To imagine such a shift, let’s first consider Trump, the former New York real estate developer who is cruising toward the Republican presidential nomination.

To be clear, nothing suggests that Trump could fix California’s housing crisis. We’re not even sure he makes much money, given his reluctance to disclose tax returns. Instead, his power resides in Trumpkinism itself.

For better or worse, Trump has reminded people that, by getting fed up and voting, they really can grab power from the incumbents who ordinarily pull the levers of government.

Of course, California practically invented fed-up voters. Exhibit A would be the late Howard Jarvis and the Proposition 13 revolt of 1978, which cut property taxes by 57 percent.

Alas, those particular fires have died. If you divide state and local taxes by average income, California’s tax burden was the nation’s sixth-highest in 2012 (the most recent year studied), the Tax Foundation reported in January.

But that’s nothing compared to the toll exacted by excessive housing costs that flow from government, cheered on by the voting citizenry.

From 2000 to 2013, the median rent in San Diego County increased by 25 percent while the median household income of renters declined by 4 percent, according to an analysis of inflation-adjusted federal data by the California Housing Partnership Corp., an affordable housing advocate.

Such forces cut into living standards statewide. Slightly more than half of California’s middle-class families are “house poor,” spending more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing. Lower-income groups fare worse, with 90 percent of families earning less than $35,000 a year considered house poor, as economist Christopher Thornberg wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in January.

Even owners are stretched: Two-thirds of middle-class households (earning $35,000 to $75,000 a year) with mortgages pay more than 30 percent of their incomes toward housing.

Thornberg’s great contribution has been to focus on the consequent economic damage. When you’re struggling to pay for housing, you aren’t spending as much on other goods and services, and you aren’t saving enough to boost investment and create jobs.

Although building a house helps the economy enormously, transferring ownership at ever-higher prices is closer to a zero-sum enterprise.

Given the stakes, you’d think officials would move mountains to build more homes. But you would be wrong. Instead, government strives mostly to restrict the supply of housing in California, and this chronic shortage is the primary reason it’s so expensive.

Local government gets most of the blame.

In all, regulations added about 40 percent to the cost of housing in San Diego County, found a landmark 2015 study led by Lynn Reaser, chief economist of the Fermanian Business and Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Direct regulatory costs — whether fees or additional engineering and financing charges on delays —ranged from $125,000 per home in Santee to $282,000 in Carlsbad.

But don’t forget that such hurdles also deter competition, especially from smaller builders, and boosts profits for well-capitalized developers above those found in much of the nation. Thornberg notes that a typical new house in California costs twice that of an identical one in Texas. Higher costs don’t explain the entire difference, but adding in higher profits does.

The San Diego Association of Governments reckons the region needs to build 11,000 new houses, condos and apartments each year through 2020, yet builders have produced barely half that annual number since 2008, says a report by development consultant Gary London.

Market pricing suggests that underproduction is not for lack of demand, at least since the recession ended. New single-family homes go for an average $1.1 million in coastal North County and the Interstate 15 corridor, while “moderately” priced ones along state Highway 78 are a relative steal in the $650,000 range.

These shortage-induced costs are inevitable whenever a local city council cuts the number of units allowed on undeveloped land or adds pocket parks and parking spaces to an urban redevelopment. Such decisions are popular with nearby residents, especially owners.

And though land-use is mostly a local matter, state law certainly chimes in, particularly with the California Environmental Quality Act.

Despite its name, CEQA in practice has little to do with reducing pollution or protecting threatened species. Instead, it’s become a powerful weapon for anybody who doesn’t want new neighbors, with complaints ranging from traffic and noise to aesthetic and social “impacts.”

This is where football billionaires come in; Spanos with his family’s Chargers, and Kroenke with his Rams. Last year, in a matter of weeks, the teams got giant stadium projects approved in Carson and Inglewood.

In 2014, the state Supreme Court ruled that CEQA didn’t apply to a project that qualified for a ballot initiative and was approved by a city council. Previously, an election was required.

Spanos and Kroenke sped right through the new loophole. The locals loved the idea of privately funded football stadiums, so there was little opposition.

The lesson was quickly absorbed by others. A mall developer in Carlsbad thought he’d succeeded in bypassing the ballot box last year, but then a competitor and group of citizens gathered enough signatures to force a special election — which the developer lost last month.

Now the Chargers are thinking of building a stadium in downtown San Diego. Spanos seems wary of trying his Carson fast-track in San Diego. So look for the team to seek full-blown voter approval on Election Day.

It’s a time-honored tactic. From 1986 to 2000, voters pondered 80 separate land-use measures just in San Diego County, reports the Institute for Local Government.

Self-evidently, the net effect has been to restrict housing production. Some were explicitly anti-growth and reflected confidence that voters heartily dislike the prospect of new neighbors.

Encinitas, for example, recently decided to put every big project to a public vote in the future, thus placing more faith in the electorate than its City Council in limiting development. We note here that 65 percent of the homes in Encinitas were occupied by their owners in the latest Census survey.

Meanwhile, politicians continue to talk a good game. In October, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed two affordable-housing bills, including one authored by former Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego.

Citing budget pressure, Brown quashed the bills because both would have used taxpayer funds to build subsidized units, supplementing the usual local fees on developers. Then he signed 14 housing bills that had no fiscal effects.

So it goes in California. Renters will continue to pay for a housing shortage as long as it’s popular with owners. Or until renters realize that protecting the environment from more people may be a laudable goal in the abstract, but it also boils down to their next annual increase from the landlord.